Walking with ghosts

Of catching up with memories, different starting blocks and a wish for the new year

I’m heading across Warschauer Brücke, weaving through people on their way home from work under a sky tilting towards sunset. On the way, I’m passing old versions of myself who once walked here. On the left when you’re going north, there is a road I once walked down with a guy I was on an all day blind date with. We were in our early twenties, had no responsibilities and too much time. At some point in the day, we went up to his flat, before going to an openair cinema. He had an “Anbauwand”, a build in cupboard and shelves, in his living room. He was a guy in his early twenties who lived like our parents in the 90s. I felt instantly repelled. We still went to see the film because it felt too impolite to break the date off. It feels strange to remember details about someone’s living room but not their name, even stranger perhaps to judge someone based on their furniture but we hadn’t been soulmates to begin with.

Moments like this happen quite regularly. I will walk along somewhere in Berlin and as though catching a scent of something, I am suddenly reminded of a memory, a previous me or the time I have lost. I shake off the memory and all the other memories that come bubbling up and walk on. I’m on my way to meet a friend at a café to cuddle some cats after a weekend that felt like the end of something.

“I think about the person I was in my mid 20’s. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood.”

― Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

It’s the day before and I’m walking up the stairs in my building only to turn around and walk back down. I had spotted my neighbour arriving and wanted to ask her if she needed any help carrying things up the stairs. She tours Berlin’s flea markets every Sunday, gathering trinkets and then selling everything she does not need. As we walk up the stairs, she asks me how I am. Immediately I can feel a sob rising in my throat, so I only shake my head, unable to put any words to how I felt. Like a glass of water filled to the brim, that’s only kept from overflowing by surface tension, I was afraid I’d break if anyone came too near. When she offers to hug me, I step back, knocking into my door, trying to get away from the offer, from the possibility of comfort. She wasn’t the first person who offered me support that day, neither was she the first whose offer I declined, though I’m unsure if I didn't want any help, if I didn’t know how to say yes or if I felt too ashamed to let anyone see me need it. When you’re accustomed to holding it all together, it’s difficult to step out of that.

Isn’t it curious how the things we want, the things we wish for, are sometimes the hardest to say yes to?

Something I keep coming back to in my head is how much of life is imitation. I don’t mean that in an internet trend kind of way of how all the influencers seem to own the same shelf or take the same supplements. I mean it in a much more fundamental way, like the way we pick up our parents’ dialects or language quirks, only to notice years down the line that other people don’t use the phrases we use.

When we grow up with a good model, or a good enough model, of how to trust, how to argue, how to give and receive help or affection, it sets us up for life. It enables us to have healthy relationships. Most of us though, we grow up with a less than good enough model, different signposts for how to be. We find ourselves in different starting blocks and it might take us years or decades to realise it and even longer to catch up.

I increasingly think of the ghosts I met walking up Warschauer Straße as belonging to an entirely different life. They belong to the before and now I am living in the after, I’m just not sure what the demarcation line is, that separates then from now. Perhaps there is no line, perhaps the line is in fact people. People who have, without them ever knowing it, helped me to gain pieces of myself back.

“We tell stories to make them visible. Or we tell stories so that we don’t have to look at them any longer.”

― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place

I have been feeling afloat and lost in time a lot this year and increasingly, it feels like a liminal time, a year that I will come to remember as lying between a before and an after. I do believe I have brought this on myself somewhat because I have spent too much time in my head, trying to unravel threads, finding a through line, a reason why some years, some months stand out so clearly in my mind, while other years melt indistinguishably together.

I remember most of my twenties in snippets that feel as though they belong to other people. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to say that I was a malleable person who tried on different lives and found that none of them fit. It is possible that by the time I reach my forties, I will feel the same about my thirties, as a decade of increasingly patchy memories with all of the threads of life that didn’t lead anywhere only obvious in hindsight but I doubt it. At the end of 2017, when I was about to turn 29, I decided to start keeping a journal because I could barely recall a moment of that year. It had all somehow slipped my mind or been drowned out in stress. I remember a lot more about the past six years than I ever did about 2017.

---

As time moves unstoppably towards Christmas, I watch pigeons one afternoon as they circle the bare trees. They are lit up from below by the setting sun, their violet grey bellies glowing with a hint of gold.

This year, instead of going to my hometown for Christmas, I am heading across the Channel, to spend the holidays with friends who are family. Thus finally accepting, or beginning to accept, that holding on to the way things „should“ be done might be one of the reasons I can barely recall my 20s.

However you’re spending the end of this year, I hope that you feel held and loved, that it involves more ease than pressure from the outside and that you can be gentle with yourself especially if the holidays involve grief of any kind.